


Kill the Memories

by fullmetal anime (sunkelles)



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003), Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Character Study, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship, POV Second Person, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-01 22:06:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14530218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunkelles/pseuds/fullmetal%20anime
Summary: You remember him. You remember cradling his infant body in your arms, remember him clutching your hand and looking up at you with love and awe in his eyes. You remember loving him. You try to reach out your hand to touch him, but he pushes his way back with a look of terror on his face that reaches his eyes: terror directed at you.





	Kill the Memories

**Author's Note:**

> i paraphrase a line from the poem "Courtney Love Prays to Oregon" by Clementine von Radics. the line is "birthed you fucked up, birthed you ugly and interesting and ready to scream" 
> 
> i highly suggest this poem because it's one of my favorites, but also because the first line is "this is the house that built me and i'm gonna burn it down" which is such a fullmetal alchemist line, like come on

Birth is a blur. Birth is confusing. Most of all, birth is pain.

You force your eyes open and try to orient yourself. You see bright blue lines covering the floor and a little blond boy on his hands and one knee, blood trailing behind him from the stump where one of his legs used to be.

You remember him. You remember cradling his infant body in your arms, remember him clutching your hand and looking up at you with love and awe in his eyes. You remember loving him. You try to reach out your hand to touch him, but he pushes his way back with a look of terror on his face that reaches his eyes: terror directed at _you._ The pain is blinding, once again, and by the time that your vision returns the boy is already gone. You don’t have time to dwell on that, though.

There’s a clawing hunger in your gut and the pain still sears through your veins. You finally get control of your body and you drag yourself out of the house, crawling like a snake on your belly. You crawl for what seems like forever, until an old woman finally finds you.

She looks down at you with tired eyes and a wrinkled smile.

“There, there dear,” the woman says. You might respond if you could form words, but you can’t. Instead you just look up at her, hoping she'll come closer. She holds out a handful of stones like red, glowing rock candies.

“Eat,” she tells you, and you don’t have to be told twice. You scarf them down as if they were the candies they look like. They aren’t, of course. They’re something far different. The taste is bitter, almost toxic, but they feel nourishing. You can feel the hunger dissipating and some of your energy replenishing. She leads you to her house, filled with other creatures just like you, born from alchemists’ grief and hubris, immediately left to starve and fend for themselves when their creators looked down and didn’t like what they saw: bits of bone peaking out, glowing eyes, skin sewn on a bit too tight.

 

You aren’t human, none of you are, and Dante makes it a point to remind you, right down to what she decides to call you. She names you after a sin just like the rest of her minions. She names you Sloth. You suppose it fits. You’re much too tired to fight her on it, which is probably _why_ it fits. 

She leaves you a jar of stones, tucks you into bed, and tells you to eat as many as you need while you recover. Then you’ll come to work for her, carrying out some scheme you’re too tired to listen to her get into just yet.

The hunger leaves, but the memories do not. They’re seared into your brain, staring you in the face whenever you close your eyes: two beautiful blond boys looking up at you in love and adoration and then one looking down on you in terror and disgust.

You’re tired, just so tired. You don’t want to see those vivid images whenever you close your eyes, howling ghosts of a life that _is not yours._ You don’t want that life, or any life at all, really. You would prefer not to be alive at all anymore.

 

You slink through the dark house and search for a gun, but you don’t find one. You can’t find any proper poisons, either, but you do find a long, sharp kitchen knife. You suppose that will just have to do.

You want this over with, after all, and judging by Dante’s plans for you, she won’t be too happy to help you get this done. She might even try to stop you. You plunge the knife into your abdomen, and your torso morphs into flowing water around the knife. You try your chest instead, then your neck, even your head and your ear: trying any part of your body is about as effective as stabbing a stream.

 

Dante walks in on you stabbing your liquid neck for the fourth or fifth time. She laughs at you, but it's a gentle old woman's laugh. 

“Did you really think you could kill yourself?” she asks with a tone of voice that says you were silly for trying in the first place

“I just want everything to stop,” you ask. Dante nods her head.

“You can’t kill yourself, but maybe you can kill the memories.”

“How do you know about those?” you demand.

“All homunculi get those,” Dante says, “it’s some side effect of the creation process. Bits of the human who created you rubbing off on you.”

 _So_ , you think, _I was right. These aren’t my memories._ You don’t find the thought as comforting as you’d hoped. Whether or not they’re yours, they still hold power over you. Those boys who created you still occupy a place in your brain and your heart.

“I want them gone,” you say, “I just want everything to stop.” Dante smiles at you, but this time it's almost feral.

“That can be arranged. At least, after you do what I need.”

 

 

Dante’s plan is both tedious and overly complicated, but you play your role as well as you need to. No better, no worse, just the way that your name suggests. It stretches on for years, and the days grow more and more tedious. But you know that if you want things to eventually end, you have to play your part. Without Dante you can’t kill the memories.

Or yourself.

 

Wrath latches onto you as a mother, and while you don’t approve, you accept the role with your casual air of detachment. You know how to do it, after all, even if you don’t want to. Even if you want to distance yourself from every memory of maternal affection that’s etched into your being.

You try to override those memories with hatred. It’s easier with Alphonse. He only brings the memories clawing back to the surface when he talks, the sweetest things he ever told his mother echoing in your mind, but just looking at Edward makes you want to drown him. His existence conjures up memories in you, from his birth to your own, and all of them feel like the terrible pain of being born again. All you really want to do is drown your creator and drown the memories with him.

You’ve drowned enough people by now that it’s an easy process. At least, it's an easy process with _most_ people, but most people aren’t alchemists of his caliber, and most people don’t bring your only weakness to fights.

He had to dig up his mother’s remains to hurt you like this, and from Alphonse’s confusion, you can tell that he did it alone.

 

Alphonse thinks that the effect the remains have on you is some sort of proof that you’re really their mother, that with one little tinker with the philosopher’s stone you’d be back to being cheerful and caring Trisha Elric.  But Edward’s anger and Lust’s claws overrule him, and Wrath tears into the scene as well, pushing the original chaos past a breaking point. You’re able to slip away in the madness, melt into a puddle inside of Alphonse’s armor to spirit him away to Dante.

But Edward finds you. Of course he does, because this one thing couldn’t just be easy. At least this armor is strong. It least it’s easy to fight in. Until it isn’t. Until they freeze you, and all you have left to fight with is the memories, the memories you never wanted in the first place. You tell these boys about your memories, about your fears, and your hatred. After all, they are the reason you were born. Why you were born so fucked up and ugly and ready to scream.

In the end, it isn’t Edward that seals your fate. It isn’t Alphonse. It’s Wrath, that pseudo-son who inserted himself into your life that you never did enough to discourage. That’s what’s ultimately your downfall. He transmutes your bodies together, and with it, fuses Trisha Elric’s remains into your side. 

 

Then, Edward barely has to do anything to finally end your life. He transmutes your body, and you can feel yourself floating away this time instead of melting. Even then, though, the memories remain. He kills you, but still, he can’t kill the memories, at least until your final breath. Maybe not even then. Maybe nothing can kill the memories.

 

"Nicely done, sweetheart,” you say, and in that moment you mean every word, “clean up after yourselves and take care of each other.” With that last bit of motherly advice you evaporate out of this world and out of their lives.

 

Perhaps not out of their lives entirely, though. You can’t kill your memories; maybe they can’t kill theirs either.

**Author's Note:**

> i originally got the idea for this fic when i thought the phrase "slouches towards resembol to be born" as a possible title, but that didn't end up feeling right when i finished it. i didn't even end up alluding to yeats's second coming at all. go figures


End file.
